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The article offers information on the February 2016 issue of the journal "Africa Research Bulletin: Political, Social and Cultural Series" on topics including continental alignments, internal developments, and constitutional changes in the country.

Africanisation refers to a renewed focus on Africa, a reclaiming of what has been taken from Africa, and forms part of a post-colonialist and an anti-racist discourse. Africanising the curriculum involves developing scholarship and research established in African intellectual traditions. The idea is that this education will produce people who are not alienated from their communities and are sensitive to the challenges facing Africa. However, the idea of Africanisation is highly contested and may evoke a false or at least a superficial sense of 'belonging,' further marginalisation, or it may emphasise relevance. This article discusses the possibility of Africanisation and takes further the argument of Graham Duncan of how Africans can reclaim their voices in the space of theological education. It unpacks the idea of Africanisation within higher education in general, examining the rationale behind the calls for Africanisation, followed by a discussion on the implications of Africanisation for theological education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the November 16 to December 15, 2015 issue of "Africa Research Bulletin," which contains various reports related to the economy, finance and politics in African countries.

Across the Sahel and Sahara regions of West Africa, large swaths of territory are essentially ungoverned. Criminal organizations, militant Islamist groups, and ethnic separatist movements created and now enjoy these ungoverned spaces as bases of operation. The case of Mali is of particular interest due to the success of militant Islamist groups in capturing and holding territory, the impact of ungoverned space on the growth of such groups, and the means by which the international community and state checked the militants. In turn, this paper examines factors related to the creation, maintenance, and elimination of ungoverned space in the western Sahel region of Africa. Using the aforementioned case study, it will investigate how militant Islamist groups use ungoverned spaces to their advantage, the spaces' impact on regional security, and the responses of states and international organizations to threats posed by such groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, women have been selected as leaders of African judiciaries. This article identifies where and when women have become chief justices and presidents of constitutional courts from 1990 to 2014. We profile women from three civil-law and three common-law countries and find that the women selected meet or exceed the requirements for holding the highest position in the judiciary. We then explore why some African countries, but not others, have had female judicial leaders. We initially find that the selection method may be less important than the type of legal system, the commitment of gatekeepers, the end of major armed conflict, and regional diffusion in explaining why some countries have seen women rise to leadership positions in the judiciary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A case study is presented on decentralized and democratic reforms in several countries in sub-Saharan during the 1990s, including in Ghana, Senegal, Zimbabwe. An overview of efforts in Africa to decentralize public institutions is provided. The devolution of power to local governments in sub-Saharan Africa is discussed.

The article discusses the Third Society of Clerks-at-the-Table (SoCATT) Africa Region Professional Development Seminar that was held at the Safari Court Hotel and Conference Centre in Windhoek, Namibia, with the theme "Capacitating Parliaments towards realizing Agenda 2063: The role of Parliaments in the age of knowledge-based economy." Information on the participants and discussion on African parliaments is also provided.

In the crowded argumentative space of political philosophies, it is often alleged that justice is the highest goal of political life. Yet for most folks in Africa it is injustice instead that continues to dominate political debate. This article uses Afrikology to advance the African cultural understanding of "equality" to argue that this is a crucial tenet in appreciating the interpretation that African communities give to the concept of justice. The subsequent social dislocation in the continent that can be found in the use of Capabilities approach as advanced by Amartya Kumar Sen's projects (1980; 1984; 1985; 1987; 1992; 1999) is also discussed. Neo-liberal's 'personal jurisdiction' particularity as universality is challenged throughout the explorative discussion between Capabilities and an emerging Afrikology (2011; 2012) position offered through the restorative scholarship of celebrated East African scholar Dani Wadada Nabudere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors introduce the journal which examines the role of labor unions in economic and political changes in Sub-Saharan Africa since the 1990s.

The utility of post-conflict elections in sub-Saharan Africa has been the subject of lively academic and policy debates. While some scholars associate several electoral outcomes with votes for peace, others argue that post-conflict elections exacerbate existing cleavages and could reproduce the conditions that led to civil war if the right electoral system is not employed. This paper examines these contesting claims using electoral data in a comparative study of the first truly post-conflict elections in Sierra Leone and Liberia. The analysis shows that political leaders in both countries received votes across numerous cleavage lines in contradiction with an ethnic census. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of multiparty competition around the world following the Cold War raises the specter of rising civil violence during election periods in emerging democracies and hybrid regimes. Yet there are also plausible theoretical reasons to expect dropping civil violence around elections in these states or, alternatively, no significant change in the level of such conflict. This article tests these hypotheses in Africa with the aid of event data on the daily rate of civil violence incidents (1997–2013). It asks if civil violence in that region is more frequent, less frequent or constant during election cycles compared to other times. To guard against definitional and data selection problems encountered in some prior cross-national studies of elections and use of force, the research design emphasizes the relative risk of social conflict at the national level. The analysis suggests three distinct patterns in Africa. Given countrywide norms, election periods in most countries run the same relative risk of a day with violent events as do non-election periods. A subset of African countries exists, however, with more civil violence during elections when judged against the national reference line for conflict. There is a smaller group of countries where the risk of electoral civil violence is comparatively low. While caution should be exercised in interpreting the findings, the policy implication is that no general reason exists to preclude or defer elections in Africa as a way to minimize social conflict associated with political campaigns, although there may be specific reasons to do so in particular countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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It is widely believed that national urban policies in Africa are rare. This is a concern bearing in mind the formidable challenges posed by urbanisation in the context of low incomes and weak institutions. The paper unpacks the concept of urban policy and what it means for the way in which cities grow. It considers the situation in five countries with different approaches. The evidence indicates increasing interest in steering urban growth through coordinated actions on land, housing and infrastructure. The positive developmental arguments seem to carry more weight than the threats of disaster if squalor and social unrest are not addressed. Yet the appropriate policy responses are not clear-cut and there are many dilemmas faced. Capacitating city governments to plan and invest in networked infrastructure appears to be one of the priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over 90 per cent of the world’s states currently select their national leaders through multiparty elections. However, in Africa the quality of elections still varies widely, ranging from elections plagued by violence and fraud to elections that are relatively ‘free and fair’. Yet, little is known about trade-offs between different strategies of electoral manipulation and the differences between incumbent and opposition actors’ strategies. We theorize that choices for specific types of manipulation are driven by available resources and cost considerations for both incumbents and opposition actors, and are mutually responsive. We also suggest that costs of manipulative strategies are shaped by the level of democratization. We test our hypotheses on a time series, cross-sectional data set with observations for 286 African elections from 1986 to 2012. We find that democratization makes ‘cheap’ forms of electoral manipulation available to incumbents such as intimidation and manipulating electoral administration less viable, thus leading to increases in vote buying. The future of democracy in Africa thus promises elections where the administration of elections becomes better and better but at the same time vote buying will increase. Not all things go together, at least not all the time. The future of democracy in Africa will mean more money in politics, more patronage and more clientelistic offers thrown around, at least in the short to medium term. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent decades, the expansion of women's political representation in sub-Saharan Africa has been nothing short of remarkable. The number of women legislators in African parliaments tripled between 1990 and 2010, resulting in African countries having among the highest rates of women's legislative representation in the world. The dominant explanations for this change have been institutional factors (namely, the adoption of gender quotas and presence of proportional representation systems) and democratization. We suggest that existing research has not gone far enough to evaluate the effects of one powerful structural change: the end of civil war. Using Latent Growth Curve modeling, we show that the end of long-standing armed conflict had large positive impacts on women's political representation, above what can be explained by electoral institutions and democratization alone. However, post-conflict increases in women's legislative representation materialize only after 2000, amid emerging international and regional norms of women's political inclusion. In countries exiting armed conflict in these recent years, women's movement into national legislatures follows a trajectory of social change that is much faster and more extensive than what we observe in other African countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that conflicts in Africa need to be understood in the context of local conceptions of justice, which differ from those of the liberal peace model. Justice in African society is based on the notion of reciprocity which, when practised, tends to lead to solutions that resemble prisoner dilemma games. Because agreements are more like truces than true peace agreements they are easily abandoned when the costs of adhering are higher. Bringing in these local conceptions are vital for peacebuilding in Africa but so is the need to reform them so that they become more sustainable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One key political development in the past decade in many, but not all, countries across Africa has been the growing saliency of morality politics in general, and of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics in particular. I argue that the uneven upward trend in the political saliency of LGBTs is closely related to two recent political processes: (1) a rapid growth of Pentecostal, Evangelical, and related Renewalist or Spirit-filled churches (demand-side factor) and (2) a democratization process leading to heightened political competition (supply side). To evaluate the above proposition, I created an original, fine-grained longitudinal dataset of media coverage of LGBTs in Africa, which I use as a measure of issue saliency. Using a series of negative binomial regression models, I find robust evidence that the saliency of LGBTs increases with a country’s population share of Renewalist Christians and that this effect increases with rising levels of political competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conventional wisdom regarding party system fragmentation assumes that the effects of electoral systems and social cleavages are linear. However, recent work applying organizational ecology theories to the study of party systems has challenged the degree to which electoral system effects are linear. This paper applies such concepts to the study of social cleavages. Drawing from theories of organizational ecology and the experience of many ethnically diverse African party systems, I argue that the effects of ethnic diversity are nonlinear, with party system fragmentation increasing until reaching moderate levels of diversity before declining as diversity reaches extreme values. Examining this argument cross-nationally, the results show that accounting for nonlinearity in ethnic diversity effects significantly improves model fit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite Africa's reputation as a place of political repression and limited popular agency, activism and popular mobilisation have been central to political change in colonial and post-colonial Africa. The social and cultural identity of activists has been neglected by historians, who have commonly studied activism through imposed normative frameworks (e.g. class struggle or decolonisation) that have not always been central to the motivations of activists themselves. This article identifies and analyses specific phases of popular activism. Mass mobilisation was crucial to the success of anti-colonial nationalism, but did not commonly result in governments that addressed the aspirations or grievances of activists. From the 1970s, African governments became vulnerable to popular pressure, in the form of urban riots and uprisings, but attempts to establish more institutionalised pressure groups for change were not generally successful. The pro-democracy movements of the early 1990s again utilised mass mobilisation to achieve their aims, but the advent of multi-party democracy across the continent did not translate into meaningful popular reform. Since 2000, popular movements have expressed discontent with neo-liberal economic policies and authoritarian governments. The Arab Spring has inspired new waves of activism, but it remains unclear whether this will bring about significant political change across the continent. Two underlying linked themes will be analysed in the paper. Firstly, the interaction between local activism and broader ideological movements and influences (nationalism, socialism, religious belief, etc): to what extent have these ideological frameworks, commonly introduced by external agents, assisted or hampered in the development of discourses of resistance or activism? Secondly, African activists, in contrast to their western counterparts, have commonly operated in relationship to both local state and western or international elites, including colonial governments, multinational corporations and international donors. The paper will examine the extent to which these relationships have shaped the ideas and behaviour of African movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proponents of democratization often claim that liberal institutions have a palliative effect on the level of conflict within societies. Critics, however, suggest that the instruments of democracy, especially elections, can spark political violence, particularly in weakly institutionalized settings. Using the newly available Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD), we examine the relationship between executive elections and social conflict in Africa for the period 1990-2009. We also assess the conditions which make elections more or less violent. We examine elections in (1) countries faced with armed conflict, (2) post-conflict settings, (3) elections in autocracies, and (4) in relatively poor countries. We also look at characteristics of elections themselves, including the margin of victory, the presence of observers, and allegations of vote fraud. Results show that while elections can sometimes spark violence, free and fair elections in genuinely democratic contexts are much less conflict prone, while illiberal elections are especially problematic. We do not find that current or recent armed conflict on a country's territory makes elections more violent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses the democracy, protests, and struggle in Africa

There is no doubt that participation as a development paradigm for the transformation of planning in South Africa took off in the early days of democracy with a revolutionary zeal. The mood of transforming planning practice from apartheid planning associated with top-down authoritarian modernist systems towards bottom-up post-apartheid democratic systems was marked by the emergence of a deluge of African metaphors such as indaba, lekgotla, simunye, tswele pele, etc. These metaphors immediately entered the scene of planning and policy documents, and this was seen largely as signifying the increased participation of black people marking moments of inclusion, transformation and empowerment. However, the legacy of apartheid planning still pervades through the work that planners do and its arresting impact remains unabated in South Africa. This paper explores the emergence of these African metaphors in participatory planning and their implications on the transformation of planning in South Africa. The paper advances the argument that African metaphors of participation have acted as empty signifiers of transformation for black people in the integrated development planning process. While the metaphors are used to construct politically sellable image for participatory processes, participation has gained ideological traction to support Eurocentric and globalist traditions of urban change. Participation reflects a new way of thinking about order, peace and development, and the African metaphors are not instrumental in changing the Eurocentric and global capitalist logic presiding over the constitution of law, theory and the technical instruments of planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In analysing Africa's development it is important to consider the complex global-local dynamics at play and the necessity of getting underneath representations of the continent in order to better understand its social change. Taking these concerns into recent work on China's engagement with Africa, I argue that the focus on Chinese power tends to occlude the role of African agency in these relationships. I demonstrate this through the case of a gas plant in Ghana that is financed by Chinese loans secured against oil sales that is being built by one of China's main national oil companies. The wider developmental benefits, however, are limited and deals such as this are brokered at the elite level which means that 'ordinary' Africans gain relatively little from these major projects. As such, while African agency is evident it is confined to elites connected to the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At first glance, ethnically based and populist forms of mobilization appear to be contradictory and ultimately mutually exclusive phenomena. Appealing to voters on the basis of a shared sense of economic grievance against powerful or wealthy sections of society does not fit well with the emphasis on sectional divisions that is required to rally support on the basis of ethnicity or region. Yet over the past ten years a number of opposition political parties in Africa have risen to prominence by fusing populist and ethnic constituencies, a form of political mobilization we call “ethnopopulism”. This article employs a pairwise comparison of Kenya and Zambia to explain how leaders have been able to harness this apparently incompatible combination to considerable electoral effect. We argue that in order to fully overcome the tensions at the heart of ethnopopulism leaders need to identify and incorporate shared narratives of exclusion felt by different communal and interest groups. But we also show that the narratives available to political entrepreneurs are shaped both by the structure of society and the ideas and networks left over from past episodes of political mobilization. Finally, we argue that variation in the reach of the urban political economy and the extent to which ethnic identities have historically been politicized shape the potential for populist mobilization to overcome ethnic divisions, and hence challenge prevailing patterns of “ethnic politics”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Debate on the 'securitization' of aid and international development since 9/11 has been anchored in two key claims: that the phenomenon has been driven and imposed by western governments and that this is wholly unwelcome and deleterious for those in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. This article challenges both of these assumptions by demonstrating how a range of African regimes have not only benefited from this dispensation but have also actively encouraged and shaped it, even incorporating it into their own militarized state-building projects. Drawing on the cases of Chad, Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda-four semi-authoritarian polities which have been sustained by the securitization trend-we argue that these developments have not been an accidental by-product of the global 'war on terror'. Instead, we contend, they have been the result of a deliberate set of choices and policy decisions by these African governments as part of a broader 'illiberal state-building' agenda. In delineating this argument we outline four major strategies employed by these regimes in this regard: 'playing the proxy'; simultaneous 'socialization' of development policy and 'privatization' of security affairs; making donors complicit in de facto regional security arrangements; and constructing regime 'enemies' as broader, international threats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of constitutional courts is a political affair because the judicial review of laws and competences potentially curbs the power of the elected branches. This paper seeks to explain the spread of constitutional courts and the extent of their formal independence. Our comparison of nine former French colonies in West Africa is built upon (a) the combination of the two competing theories of international diffusion and domestic strategic action-the political insurance model-and (b) a new, theoretically and arithmetically refined index of formal independence. The empirical analysis in this area of similar political context supports the argument that global trends and foreign reference models set a minimum standard and that interests in political insurance determine the deviations from institutional diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its rise to a prominent position as a key approach to understanding and explaining African politics, governance, and political economy, a number of critiques have been published on neopatrimonialism and its perspective on African politics. This essay contributes to the emerging criticism of the neopatrimonial approach by addressing one of the key arguments of the theory concerning the intrinsic nature of African politics, its cultural underpinnings, and the ideas which form the basis of democracy and politics for the common good in Africa. Although the underpinnings and ideational basis exist and are central to the dynamics of African politics, the neopatrimonial approach has treated them as nonexistent. In its discussion, this essay also describes the sources and vital influence of African ideas on democracy and the common good in African states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]